Read The Watch Tower for Free Online Page A

than she had intended, and even made a suggestion. ‘Since you can’t knit, and I don’t quite see you entertaining a serviceman,’ she laughed a little, ‘you’d better join something.’
    From an hour’s consideration of ‘Clubs’ in the telephone directory, Laura drew the names of three organisations. At the first one, the enamelled woman behind the desk looked her over with a single intimidating flicker of her eyelashes.
    ‘ What was it you wanted?’ (She could not haveheard correctly.) ‘To join the club?—I see. Do you know any members? Three members must sponsor your application, of course.—Then I’m afraid—’
    An American colonel pushed through the swing-doors and lamps were lighted behind this lady’s suddenly beautiful blue eyes. Someone was at home after all!
    Laura took herself off, rocking uneasily on her high heels in the rubbery carpet. She had had no conception that the club would be so—rich. Exclusive. They wanted—they said they wanted people to help, but—There was a roaring fire of embarrassment in her chest; not only her face but the whole of her boiled and blazed as she staggered knee-deep (it felt) in the asphalt pavement back to the Quay. It was Saturday afternoon. She had hoped to announce to her mother and Clare—
    At the next club, a week later, she turned out to be too young; at the next one, she was not a member of the Church; at the one after that, the entrance fee was three guineas.
    Not the girl to pass off these rejections with a self-protective and negligent wave of the hand, she stared at her mother for advice.
    ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ Mrs. Vaizey said. ‘Remember Bruce and the spider.’
    ‘Just a jiff.’ The greengrocer was a middle-aged,middle-sized man with thinning hair and brown eyes. like small stones.
    Mrs. Vaizey had said, ‘Find out from one of the shopkeepers where we go to collect our new ration books. Ask anyone.’ So Clare asked him after he had served her with potatoes and onions and started to pick over, in the fashion of a browsing animal who has spent a lifetime in one bare paddock, his spotted apples.
    ‘Now, look,’ he said, brushing his hands over his canvas apron before using them to point with.
    Clare stood with him in the doorway of his shop. He smelled like a fruit salad. Evidently he was thinking hard. He looked as single-minded as a commando. ‘See that hill up there? Well, you go up there. You turn left at the second lot of cross-roads. You keep straight on for a block. You go over— ’
    While looking at him more or less rationally, and trying to absorb his brain-bending instructions, Clare began to be aware of a current of charm and joy humming through her. The man kept talking. She wished he would never stop. She herself had become a pinpoint astronomically distant, silence, light.
    Oh, man, she thought without words. Oh, man. I love you.
    Life was hard. He was harmless. He had forgotten her. He was all concentration, and innocent, and vulnerable. Clare only knew he awed and thrilled her, that she at the same time knelt to him and protected him out ofan ocean of warmth she suddenly had at her disposal.
    ‘Well, ’ve you got that? Do you know where you’re going?’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ she lied ardently.
    ‘Well, you’re set like a jelly!’ In his trance again, in his enclosure where the earth was eaten bare, he glanced at the girl and ambled back to his work.
    Clare reeled away down the street, not thinking at all. She could have hugged his knees. Oh, how wonderful! Wonderful! The man was beautiful! She could fly. She could electrify the air. She could create—cause—That wasn’t it. She knew—had witnessed—understood—felt—
    She leapt along the footpath, a new Philippides, alight, alight. Glory!
    Twice she lost her way to the ration book centre and finally had to ask for directions again, but she only turned down the volume of joy in order to hear, then swooned up the hill, her head ringing with